Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction Read Free

of the quadrangle, my starched shirt stained with drinking fountain water and clinging coolly, deliciously to my chest. Nate said something about Miss Turner’s nose looking like a turnip and wasn’t that a coincidence and wasn’t that argument for a Creator. Barny chided him in his gentle way, and I wished I could see so as to look at Miss Turner’s turnip, when Nate swore and laughed in the same breath, muttered that it was too bright, and strode off.

    His mood swings weren’t always so explosive. Often—I’m sure I was the only one who heard it—I noticed something in him change, as if a dimmer switch had been turned down inside him. Other times it was as if a signalman in his brain threw a lever, causing his conversation to rumble off in a new direction. He would be talking about a stereo he wanted to buy, then clouds would move in, and suddenly he was talking about speakers and the way their carbon cores sucked and pounded like a heart.

    So when, in that foodhall in August, Nate seconded Barny’s idea about going to Blackwall Reach, I thought it merely another freak weather change in the fickle atmosphere of planet Nate; It would blow over and Barny would locate his temporarily misplaced sense.

    But it didn’t blow over, and Barny, apparently, hadn’t sent out a search party.

    We weaved a web of half-truths among our parents, and later that night there was seen a line of three quiet boys hopping penguin-like onto the last-chance 377 from Southlands Shopping Centre to Attadale.

    I could imagine the bus driver’s eyes on me as I scrabbled through my wallet for the tokens that would buy me passage. Nate passed me, pausing only to buzz-click his multi-rider. When I finally yielded the coins to the driver, I caught the whiff of Betadine, and felt the brief touch of his hand, which was leathery like a gardener’s glove. He must’ve been an old-fashioned sort, and if he suspected there was some mischief afoot, he didn’t let on.

    Nate made a b-line for the back seat, apparently, and I uncharacteristically kicked every other seat leg or floor rivet on my pilgrimage to the back of the swaying bus. When Barny and I plopped down next to Nate, he was poking about in his backpack.

    We were silent for a time, until Nate pressed two objects into my hands. “Bread. Juice,” he said. “Rations,” followed by words I couldn’t make out above the sudden roaring whine of the bus as it geared down. I heard Barny murmur thanks from the other side of Nate.

    We bit and munched in silence and then Nate began plugging us with questions—questions about what we had seen and heard that day. Ever since we had told him our secret, he’d been intrigued. But lately his interest had hit some sort of critical mass—become a neutron star of fascination. That night in the bus it burned such that I fancied I could feel it radiating from within him.

    “What has our friend been up to?” he said, and by that he meant the man on whose vision and hearing we had been eavesdropping.

    Yes—Barney’s new ears, and my new eyes, came from the same man. This much we knew, and more.

    “Burning his fingers,” I said nervously. The rattling cage of the bus was making me edgy. The whole thing was not right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

    I took Nate’s silence to mean go on. “Just a pulse today. An image. He snuffed a candle with his fingers,” and I pressed my thumb and forefinger together to indicate. The man’s fingers had looked dry.

    ‘The man’ was pale and thin. He had brown hair that was curling at the edges for want of cutting. Sometimes I glimpsed him as he stared, motionless into a mirror. Sometimes I would catch a shard of his reflection in a window or the blade of a knife. His name was Stephen Brand, age 36, 6’11’’ as it turned out.

    “Shouting,” said Barny in a low voice. I felt Nate’s attention leave me.

    “Shouting what?” said Nate. “Was the woman there?”

    “I don’t know. Not